A Guinea Pig Bath

Our guinea pigs, beautiful though they are, are smelly. In fact, they stink. And they’re greasy and a little bit mitey. So today, we decided to take action. We decided to give them a bath.

Now, they’ve had a bath once before in their lives and they didn’t enjoy it, but it had to be done. I think they knew what was in store for them because they didn’t want to come out of their cage AT ALL – especially Betty – but we managed to grab them eventually and then took them upstairs to the bathroom, where the dreaded bath was to take place.

Enter the water. Both pigs had different tactics to get them through their ordeal. It was Betty’s turn first and she tried the, “If I freeze in space, maybe they won’t notice I’m here and they’ll stop this torture” method, albeit with a few escape attempts.

Treacle thought the “Grip on tightly to anything you can get hold of” method suited her better.

After they were squeaky clean, they had a quick rub down and then got wrapped up in towels. This made for some very cute photos!

Sister Betty:

Sister Treacle:

We took them downstairs and swapped their towels for some clean, dry ones. Betty was still NOT impressed by the whole thing and had a bit of a tantrum.

And then the inevitable happened. When guinea pigs get wrapped up in towels in our house, it’s only a matter of time before they get rocked and sung to like babies.

Then came the fun bit where they’d mostly dried off but were all ruffled and were styling mini mohawks. This is most of the reason we ever bath them at all!

Now they smell delightful (as in, they don’t smell like guinea pig poo) and their hair is as soft as anything and not greasy at all. I’m sure they’ll recover from the trauma in a few days when they’ve comfort eaten enough hay and carrot peelings to at least double in size. At least they won’t have to go through it again until some time next year when they become unbearably stinky again. It was definitely worth it for the mohawk pictures though!